On the 17th of July in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine, on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The aircraft was a Boeing 777-200ER, registration 9M-MRD. There were 15 crew and 283 passengers on board, making this the deadliest airliner shootdown in history. The passengers…
Read more… 25 May 18
It seems that physical issues with aircraft are all over the news right now, with the latest being Sichuan Airlines flight 8633. On the 14th of May 2018, Sichuan Airlines flight 8633 departed Chongqing, China for a scheduled passenger flight to Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (the area of Tibet in the…
Read more… 18 May 18
The 28th of April marks 30 years since Aloha Airlines flight 243 had its hull ripped open at 24,000 feet. In light of the current focus on metal fatigue and the proper maintenance of aircraft, I thought it would be interesting to look at the accident in 1988 which changed the way we looked at…
Read more… 27 Apr 18
This week, the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man who once worked as a mechanic at SabreTech, the airline maintenance company at the centre of the tragic loss of ValuJet flight 592, which crashed into the Florida Everglades on the 11th of May 1996. It’s not often…
Read more… 13 Apr 18
Last week, I covered the sequence of events that led to a Boeing 767-300 ER wheels-up landing at Warsaw airport. A hydraulic hose connecting the hydraulic system on the right leg of the main landing gear failed as they departed Newark. The flight crew decided to continue to Warsaw but once there, they found that…
Read more… 6 Apr 18
The entire world seemed to be watching when LOT airlines flight LO16 landed wheels up at Warsaw Airport in 2011. I wrote about it at the time, impressed with the smooth landing: The captain of the flight, Tadeusz Wrona, was the subject of much admiration as a result. His last name means crow in Polish,…
Read more… 30 Mar 18
The Anatomy of an A350–CRJ Collision at Atlanta
On the 10th of September 2024, an Airbus A350 took the tail off of a Bombardier CRJ at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, USA. Delta Air Lines flight 295…
Why KLM Cut the Steering Cables on Two Perfectly Functional Boeing 737s
Last month, we looked at the night of 28th of November 2004 at Barcelona Airport. KLM 1673 ran off the runway at high speed, stopping just short of a canal.…
How Important is Having a Sterile Cockpit?
This question was posted to r/flying by a private pilot who wanted to know: do airline pilots ever engage in small talk about irrelevant things during taxiing, run-up, takeoff, and…
Someone has to write the TAF
It turns out that there a person sitting there deciding what the weather is going to do. Which seems obvious, except that I had somehow never asked msyelf who “someone”…
The CIA's Shark Screen
Today we have a guest post from the CIA! In their archives, researching something completely different, I found the answer to a question I never thought to ask. I immediately…
The First Jet to Land on an Aircraft Carrier (Deliberately)
“The Vampire was the first jet to land on a moving aircraft carrier deliberately.” This quote from Airshow Luke, our MC at the Legacy of Liberty airshow, made me almost…
Bird Strikes, Balloon Landings and Falling in Love with a Boeing 777
The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is…
Petrified, Petrified, Petrified
There’s been some interesting reporting in the UK media about a “near disaster” over Canary Wharf involving the captain having to intervene (the horror!) after air data systems failed on…